Mid-Day Digest

Nov. 5, 2018

THE FOUNDATION

“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure."—Thomas Jefferson (1823)

IN BRIEF

“A president doesn’t get to decide on his own who’s an American citizen and who’s not,” declared a noted constitutional law professor, who was rebutting President Donald Trump’s trial balloon regarding an executive order about birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment. “That’s not how the Constitution of the United States works. That’s not how the Bill of Rights works. That’s not how our democracy works.”

You may have guessed already — that “scholar” is none other than Barack Obama, the same hypocrite who “decided on his own who’s an American citizen” with his unconstitutional DACA gambit. Remember? Armed with his phone and pen, Obama decided that since Congress had declined to advance his preferred legislation to grant citizenship to “Dreamers” — immigrants of a certain age brought here by their parents — he would do so himself. And that was despite Obama’s previous repeated declarations that the president had no such authority.

To be sure, there’s a key difference between Obama’s action and Trump’s proposal — beyond the fact that Trump hasn’t actually done anything yet. As we explained last week, we believe it’s clear the authors of the 14th Amendment did not intend to extend citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. That means, contrary to breathless Leftmedia assertions, Trump would not actually be changing the Constitution with an executive order. He’d be changing the executive branch’s interpretation of it to match the original intent.

Yet Trump quickly tempered his idea by saying that he’d rather see Congress address the issue. He’s on far better footing with that suggestion, but that doesn’t make Obama’s demagoguery any more accurate.

Meanwhile, Obama is the same guy who also not long ago hypocritically lectured, “I’d like to think there are compassionate conservatives out there who think there’s nothing compassionate about ripping immigrant children from the arms of their mothers at the border and putting them in pens.” You know, like his administration did.

On a final note, Obama wondered at another rally, “Why is it that the folks that won the last election are so mad all the time?” First of all, conservatives are mad that hypocrites like Obama are still sanctimoniously telling us how evil we are. Second, conservatives are pleasantly happy compared to the rage of the Left.

The truth will always eventually come out, as it now appears is the case with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He endured a last-minute rash of spurious sexual-assault allegations in an orchestrated smear campaign by Democrats intent on preventing his confirmation. We can only hope this truth will prevent the same type of baseless abuse of a public official at the hands of those motivated by craven partisan considerations in the future.

On Saturday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released a 400-page report on the Senate’s investigation into the various allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Kavanaugh. The big takeaway from Grassley’s report is that no evidence has been found to corroborate any of the accusations. The report succinctly states, “Following the separate and extensive investigations by both the Committee and the FBI, there was no evidence to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault made against Justice Kavanaugh.”

Furthermore, four individuals have been referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution for making false statements to the Judiciary Committee. Included among those four individuals are, as we previously noted, Julie Swetnick and her self-promoting attorney Michael Avenatti. According to the Senate report, “Evidence appears to support the position that [they] criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the Committee and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.” The other two individuals are one who claimed an acquaintance of his son was raped by Kavanaugh on a boat in Newport, Rhode Island, but who later recanted his story; and Judy Munro-Leighton, a leftist activist who admitted her story of being raped in a car by Kavanaugh “was just a ploy.”

It’s important to note that the committee isn’t done with its investigation. The report indicates that this is “a status update on the Committee’s ongoing efforts to review and address additional matters that arose during the course of the investigation, including potential violations of Senate rules, potential witness tampering, and potential false statements made to the Committee in violation of federal law.” Clearly, Grassley is not about to let Democrats get away with their outrageously partisan hit job on Kavanaugh. That type of dirty, deceitful politics must be exposed and those responsible for it held accountable. It is the only way to ensure the integrity of the process in the future.

In the two years since a nationwide groundswell of grassroots support led to Donald Trump’s surprise victory over their shoo-in favorite, Hillary Clinton, Democrats and their MSM protagonists have stepped up their massive campaign of lies and deception as they scramble to derail support for Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda ahead of tomorrow’s 2018 midterm elections. Help us hold their feet to the fire and continue exposing the Left’s blatant hypocrisy. We won’t let up, and we need your help! For more than 22 years, our work has been made possible thanks solely to the financial generosity of Patriots like you. Please help us continue the fight and support our mission today. Thank you for your support, and for all you do for Liberty. —Mark Alexander, Publisher

FEATURED ANALYSIS

Last week, following the murder of 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, California Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris didn’t let a crisis go to waste. “We have to speak truth about the fact that racism exists in our country and anti-Semitism exists in our country. We need to speak truth about that and deal with it,” she tweeted. No doubt, Ms. Harris. And addressing your fellow Democrats and their media allies would be a great place to start.

Right at the top in fact. Here’s a photo of former President Barack Obama posing with rabid anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, whose most recent outburst was referring to Jews as “termites.” The photo was purposefully buried for 13 years. “I swore myself to secrecy,” stated photographer Askia Muhammad, who also alleged a staffer from the Congressional Black Caucus requested the photo for “safekeeping.” He added, “If the picture was exposed, it could still be a deal breaker for Obama.”

Perhaps during his initial run for president in 2008. But by the Democrats Party’s 2012 convention, the hearty round of boos that ensued when chairman Antonio Villaraigosa stated that moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem would be part of the party’s platform, indicated Obama had little to worry about going forward.

Then there’s Keith Ellison, elected deputy chairman of the Democrat National Committee despite a decades-long association with Farrakhan and his own track record of defending anti-Semites. He is joined by least six other Democrats, including Reps. Maxine Waters (CA), Barbara Lee (CA), Danny Davis (IL), Andre Carson (IN), Gregory Meeks (NY), and Al Green (TX), who have also attended meetings with Farrakhan.

Democrats were also highly supportive of the anti-Trump Women’s March, despite the fact that co-leader Tamika Mallory not only attended a Jew-bashing conference by Farrakhan but eagerly promoted that attendance. The other March co-leader was Linda Sarsour, who once tweeted that “Sharia law is reasonable,” and gave a speech at the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in Houston, where she stated that anyone who supported “defending” and “humanizing” Israelis was “on the side of the oppressor.”

Another prominent Democrat who routinely associated with both Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder is Al Sharpton. The same Al Sharpton who referred to Jews as “diamond merchants” following three nights of rioting in Crown Heights precipitated by the death of seven-year-old black American Gavin Cato, who was run over and killed by a driver in a Hasidic Jewish rabbi’s entourage. Sharpton led the protests that turned into riots, letting the neighborhood’s Jewish community know exactly where he stood in the process. “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house,” he declared.

These Democrat Party “luminaries” are joined by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who DNC Chairman Tom Perez called the “future of the party.” If so, it is a future where Ocasio-Cortez insists that Israel’s defense against attacks from Gaza was a “massacre,” Palestinian Gazans and Ferguson blacks are similarly oppressed victims, and Jews are “white privileged.”

White privileged Jews? Last Wednesday, The New York Times admitted anti-Semitic crimes, “constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year,” and that “bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore.”

What “complexities?” As columnist Ben Shapiro explains, leftists embrace “a preferred narrative in which Jews are part of the white privileged class, unless they are victimized by white supremacists.”

Leftist-inspired anti-Semitism is hardly confined to New York City. “If you’re hunting for the places where anti-semitism thrives in America, you’d be better off looking on its college campuses than in the White House,” writes columnist Nolan Finley, referring to the burgeoning Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction (BDS) movement that routinely refers to Israel as an apartheid state.

If Democrats had their way, America would be an apartheid state, and nothing makes it clearer than their obsession with white privilege. Thus, Hillary Clinton can assert whites need to “recognize” it, Nancy Pelosi can accuse Trump of trying to “make American white again,” and Joe Biden can insist that Republicans “don’t want black folks voting.” CNN’s Don Lemon can declare that white men are the “biggest terror threat in this country,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg can assert America is a nation where an “embittered white conservative minority clings to power,” until they are “replaced,” and the same paper’s editorial board member Sarah Jeong can speak to the “joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

White women? They “benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain,” asserts NY Times columnist Alexis Grenell.

Is it working? According to a Harvard-Harris poll, Trump’s approval among black Americans has more than tripled, from 8% in 2016, to 29% this year. Maybe record levels of employment and a 3.1% increase in hourly earnings, both directly attributable to the Trump administration’s economic policies, are more important. And maybe an increasing number of black Americans are beginning to recognize the inherent racism of a party that sees them as eternal victims. Victims who face social ostracizing if they stray from progressive dogma.

If Democrats take the House tomorrow, Maxine Waters, who could be the next chair of the Financial Services Committee, revealed to Wall Street, banks, and insurance companies that she remains firmly wedded to the politics of victimization. “I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses,” she stated. “I have not forgotten that you undermined our communities. … What am I going to do to you? What I am going to do to you is fair. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”

Such a rant is many things. An economic policy isn’t one of them. Moreover, Waters conveniently forgets that banks were coercedby Democrats into making loans to minority homebuyers with questionable credit — lest they be accused of racism.

That an economically illiterate Democrat party — whose entire agenda is the antithesis of American exceptionalism — has a chance to prevail in either chamber of Congress is a testament to many things: a mainstream media that is a de facto extension of that party and its agenda; a president whose compulsion to respond to every slight against him, no matter how puerile, alienates many people and too often obscures the enormous successes he has engendered; a Republican Party whose commitment to conservative principles is more about campaign sloganeering than governance; and a bankrupt education system, “downstream” from both politics and culture, that has produced millions of weak-thinking Americans.

Americans who cannot see that the well-documented horror of socialist/Marxist philosophy and the “fundamental transformation” of America are indistinguishable from one another.

Thus, voters must choose between a GOP led by spineless, ideologically challenged frauds who squandered two years of congressional control — and a grand opportunity to embrace desperately needed conservative principles (especially fiscal conservatism) — and a Democrat Party whose aging leadership is frantically trying to keep the ever-increasing numbers of its anti-Semitic, race-baiting, socialist/Marxist “stars” in check.

Opt for the GOP. One Venezuela in the Western hemisphere is more than enough.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Scott Powell: “For those who can’t fathom what mob rule would look like in the United States, the 11th-hour ambush of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh reveals all you need to know: unscrupulous tactics of personal destruction exploiting the #MeToo movement to set the stage for presumption of guilt ginned up by media sensationalism that feeds mob rule. Is Democratic Party leadership now all in with Saul Alinsky, whose ‘10 Rules for Radicals’ are simply ‘the ends justify the means’? Regardless of party affiliation, citizens need to take a stand now, and voting remains the surest way to send a clear message. It’s time to repudiate mob rule and high-level corruption that has severely harmed federal government institutions — the FBI, the Justice Department, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and constitutional due process. The most important issue this midterm election is not the candidates but rather the political parties and where each stands on rule by constitutional law vs. rule by deep state elites and mob rule. Make that determination and get out and vote.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “I’ve always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”

Upright: “If we want our government to function better, we should do the work of evaluating members of Congress more carefully, rather than using congressional elections as a proxy vote on our opinion of the president.” —Jay Cost

Political landscape: “Why do the Republicans have so few districts where they could win a Democrat-held seat? Because with a few exceptions, they already picked all the low-hanging fruit in 2010 and 2014, and held on to it through 2016. There just aren’t that many competitive districts represented by Democrats left.” —Jim Geraghty

Alpha Jackass: “You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate for Texas and not a hit-man in a porno movie. I’m sorry. I know he lost his eye in war — or whatever.” —"Saturday Night Live" “comedian” Pete Davidson, laughing at the eye patch worn by Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in an explosion while serving in Afghanistan

Demo-gogues: “The latest jobs numbers may look good, but we must not forget they coexist with a huge deficit-ballooning GOP tax break that went mainly to the wealthy, for which we will pay a price for down the road. When the average family sees their health care costs go up because of Republican actions, these numbers will mean little.” —Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who led Democrats in assuring that everyone’s health care costs skyrocketed under ObamaCare

And last… “One of the (many) odd conceits of celebrityhood is the notion that the ability to sing or tell jokes or portray other characters somehow qualifies one to tell others how to vote. Not sure electricians or truckers or sales associates feel that way about themselves.” —Pat Sajak

Join our editors and staff in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families. We also humbly ask prayer for your Patriot team, that our mission would seed and encourage the spirit of Liberty in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

"Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules." —Thomas Jefferson (1801)

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly-acclaimed weekday digest of news, policy and opinion written from the heartland for grassroots leaders nationwide — not the MSM's ubiquitous Beltway echo-chambers. Read More

What We Offer

On the Web

We offer solid conservative perspective on the issues of the day, including analysis, opinion columns, historic documents, humor, cartoons and more.

Via Email

Choose between our full-length Digest or our quick-hitting Snapshot to keep up with news important to Liberty. We also offer Humor on Monday and Alexander's column on Wednesday.

Email Subscriptions

Support Us

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. We are not sustained by any political, special interest or parent organization, and we do not accept advertising to ensure our advocacy is not restrained by commercial influence. Our mission and operation budgets are funded entirely by the contributions from Patriots like you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!